LONDON — I go past her door every other day when I walk the dog. There is the blue-and-white English Heritage plaque: “Sylvia Plath 1932-1963 Poet lived here 1960-61.” I tend to pause and gaze at it, imagining her walking to the top of Primrose Hill.
It has been a half-century since her suicide, an anniversary marked by the publication this year of several books. “The blood jet is poetry,” she wrote, “There is no stopping it” — lines from “Kindness” that capture the implacability of her verse. And there has been no stopping the Plath polemics these past 50 years.
Every war is fought over memory. That is true in the Middle East and true of the tangled legacy of Plath and her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, who died in 1998. Who sinned first, who was more sinned against? Something there is about suicide that will not rest.
Al Alvarez, in his classic study of suicide, “The Savage God,” describes the scene at that Chalcot Square apartment. “It was so small that everything seemed sideways on.” But there was room for the essential: “A typewriter stood on a little table by the window, and they took turns at it, each working shifts while the other minded the baby.”Of course we are fascinated. No imagination can resist the meeting of the craggy Yorkshireman and the lithe brilliant American woman on a Fulbright. Their passion draws us in, the surge of creativities at that typewriter, and his affair, the separation, Eros and Thanatos, the what-might-have-been.
Just a couple of minutes’ walk away from Chalcot Square, at 23 Fitzroy Road, is the house once inhabited by W.B. Yeats where Plath took her life on Feb. 11, 1963, in the dead of winter. She left two mugs of milk for her children. Then she went into the kitchen and, as Alvarez writes, “sealed the door and window as best she could with towels, opened the oven, laid her head in it and turned on the gas.”He does not believe she intended to kill herself. The note she left contained instructions for calling the doctor. All sorts of plausible things might have happened that would have saved her but did not.
That end was a beginning. It was the end of something present from the early loss of her father Otto, which left her with that sense of abandonment and death-pull expressed in these lines: “I was ten when they buried you./At twenty I tried to die/And get back, back, back to you.” The poem is called “Daddy,” and in it we see Plath as what Alvarez calls “an imaginary Jew from the concentration camps of the mind” and her German father as an “Aryan eye” Nazi.
It was the beginning of the polemic, with the various defenders of Hughes and Plath, the battles over Plath’s grave and what happened to her diaries, and the suicide in 2009 of their son Nicholas Hughes — an act that leads Terry Castle of Stanford University in a recent New York Review of Books piece on two new Plath books to this extraordinary conclusion: “His mother was by then long dead — he had never had any memory of her — yet even so I couldn’t help wanting to kill her.”Yes, the past is virulent, for individuals as for nations.
My mother, who was manic-depressive and tried more than once to take her life, was an admirer of Plath. Like Plath, she endured electroconvulsive treatment in the 1950s. Here is Plath on that experience in her novel “The Bell Jar”:“I shut my eyes. There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath. Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.”Of course I stop outside that house for more than one reason.
I see my slight, fragrant mother, aged 29 in 1958, with metal plates being affixed to either side of her head, flattening her dark curls, and I feel her racing heart as a doctor straps the plates to her swabbed temples, enclosing her skull in its high-voltage carapace.
Hughes, in “Birthday Letters,” the book of poems about Plath he published in 1998, imagined the experience in “The Tender Place.” It begins, “Your temples, where the hair crowded in,/Were the tender place.” And continues: “Somebody wired you up./Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed/The thunderbolt into your skull.”I picked up “Birthday Letters” the other day. It delves through a love long gone that is alive, inexhaustible. I had forgotten my mother gave me the book, 11 months before her death, until I stumbled on her inscription:“I hope this illuminates the meaning of love ... With much love and thanks. M.”And I suppose when I stumbled on that I had to write this.
